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True confessions from a young child facing their worst fear Lex E. Santí, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC It was 1987, and I woke up in the dark to something crawling over me. Dazed I rubbed my eyes and pulled back the sleeping bag. I heard screeching. I don't remember having awoken to screeching like this in the last 40 years. This type of screeching landed in my chest before it reached my ears. I was a teenager and something was moving in the living room of Jesse Winter's house th

A Key to Something -- On starting a newsletter, staying with the blog, and what I'm thinking about these days A Key Therapy PLLC, LCSW I've been writing here for years — poems, essays, dispatches from the practice, the occasional film recommendation — and that continues. This is still home base. But I've been circling the idea of a newsletter for a while now, and I finally did it. It's called A Key to Something . The name is a play on aquí — the Spanish word for here, which

After years of writing, revising, and carrying the story in my head, I’m excited to share that my debut novel, The Song of the Midnight Rider, is now available. At its core, the book is a literary noir road novel —a story about loyalty, found family, and the restless pull of the American road. The novel follows Jordan Samson , a young man moving through a fractured landscape of ambition, violence, and uneasy alliances. Along the way he encounters hustlers, drifters, and unlik

Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, PLLC - A Key Therapy Three Poems from 2004 Plum Ruby Review, Summer Issue In the summer of 2004, I published three poems in Plum Ruby Review . I was living in Washington, DC, on the edge of entering an MFA program, politically charged, aesthetically restless, and deeply interested in how language could stretch—visually, ethically, bodily. These poems come from a time when I was less concerned with coherence and more interested in pressure : how an imag

Lex E Santí, LCSW, MFA – Founder, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC Every few years, the federal government finds a new way to remind us that the “helping professions” aren’t actually meant to be helped. The newest example is the U.S. Department of Education’s proposal to reclassify certain master’s programs — education, nursing, public health, social work — so that they are no longer considered “professional degrees” for federal student loan purposes. The Department of Education insi

Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA Books have been my most loyal companions. I’ve been reading since I was old enough to understand that the world was bigger than my family, bigger than the town where I grew up, bigger even than the United States. Books were my way out and my way in. They taught me how to live, how to argue, how to be tender. They’ve never once ghosted me, though I’ve been guilty of ignoring them. Below are fifteen that shaped me. Not in some linear list, not as a c

Lex E. Santí, LCSW, MFA 1. Introduction Client engagement in psychotherapy is a dynamic process shaped by numerous interacting variables: motivation, readiness, emotional openness, external pressures, and the acceptance of a potential diagnosis. While extensive research has examined the mechanisms of change and the therapeutic relationship (Norcross & Lambert, 2019; Wampold, 2015), a notable gap remains: few assessment tools measure both a client's motivation and acceptance o

Reflection on Mourning in the Shadow of a Giant at Cornell By Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA On September 9, 2019, the Cornell community...